What’s in a word? Well, not a lot it would seem, if New Zealand’s experience dealing with Covid-19 is any guide. Words now seem apparently to have no definitive meaning, but rather mean that just what those uttering them imagined them to mean at the time. Just like Humpty Dumpty said to Alice, “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

On 25 March the Prime Minister announced the Level 4 lockdown to Parliament, explaining that its purpose was to “manage the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic within New Zealand” because “there was early evidence of community transmission of COVID-19.” Hence the accompanying “Go hard, go early” slogan and the “flattening the curve” tag-line.

Two weeks into the lockdown, on 9 April, just before the Easter weekend, the Prime Minister was talking about breaking the “chain of transmission”, and, consistent with the earlier comments, about managing the spread, noting that with just 29 new cases reported that day “we (were) turning a corner.” She described the campaign as a marathon, but then, in a phrase which has come to be problematic, added that the aim was to keep “eliminating” the virus from New Zealand.

That appeared to be a significant step-up from the earlier ambition of “flattening the curve”. This was at a time when more and more people were starting to be hit hard by the economic consequences of the lockdown, and the calls upon the government’s substantial assistance subsidies and assistance were growing daily. Was it just coincidence, or had there been a conscious decision based on the clear success to date that, rather just trying to manage the spread of Covid-19, New Zealand now had the opportunity to be bolder and become the first country in the world to eliminate it completely? If so, had any assessment been done of the economic and social costs of doing so, and whether it was even a feasible objective, given that at some point New Zealand would have to reopen its doors to trading partners which might have adopted a lesser standard?

Debate and speculation about the true nature of the government’s policy continued for the next couple of weeks while the number of new cases being identified kept on falling. The reduction was such that after a one-week extension to Level 4, the Prime Minister was able to announce a move to the less restrictive Level 3 from 28 April. Foreshadowing that announcement on 16 April, she observed this was possible because “there are promising signs our go hard and go early elimination strategy is working and the lockdown is breaking the chain of community transmission.”

But here is when the fun began. According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, eliminate means to “get rid of” without qualification. It is final and absolute. On that basis, therefore, it was reasonable to assume that by talking of elimination New Zealand was seeking to get rid of Covid-19, once and for all. But, again, things are not simple, as the Prime Minister later told Radio New Zealand that “when I talk about elimination it does not mean zero cases, it means zero tolerance for cases.” She further explained that “the idea of Covid being completely gone, that is eradication - so there are important differences there." (The Concise Oxford Dictionary does not think so – it applies the same “get rid of” definition to eradication, as it does to elimination.)

While we were working all that out, Professor Michael Baker, part of the Otago Medical School cabal that seems to have been driving so much of the policy response to date, joined the fray. He felt that the coming Level 3 period would be “a good opportunity to work on the definition of elimination.” Even more helpfully, his colleague Professor Nick Wilson intervened with his view of how elimination should be defined. According to him elimination means “no active cases at all in the country for at least a period of four weeks of extensive testing and other surveillance systems in place.” In his mind, elimination is clearly some way off.

When the Prime Minister announced on 27 April that New Zealand had “currently” eliminated Covid-19 from our shores, it was not clear whether she was applying the Dictionary’s definition, or her own redefinition. Alice’s reply to Humpty Dumpty that “the question is whether you can make words mean so many different things" was starting to appear ever more relevant.

The mounting confusion was all left for the Director-General of Health to try and clear up on 28 April. New Zealand had not yet eliminated the virus, he explained, because “elimination is not a point in time - it's not 'we've got to the end of alert level 4, we've eliminated it'. It's not something that you can just say 'done and dusted' - it is an ongoing effort." According to the Director-General, elimination is something else again. Adopting neither the Prime Minister’s, nor the Concise Oxford Dictionary’s, nor Professors Baker’s or Wilson’s definitions, he described elimination as "a small number of cases, a knowledge of where those cases are coming from and an ability to identify cases early, stamp them out and maintain strict border restrictions so we're not importing new cases.”

So, there we have it. New Zealand’s Covid-19 strategy has all along really been about “flattening the curve”, which we have achieved remarkably well, not about getting rid of Covid-19 after all. The bigger question now becomes, has it all been worth it? Certainly, in terms of controlling the spread of Covid-19, the answer must be a resounding yes. However, as people start to think about picking up the threads of life once more, debate will intensify about whether the mounting economic and social costs which will last for years to come have been worth it, or whether a steadier approach such as Australia’s might have been better for our country in the long term.

But since words apparently now have only the meaning those using them choose to apply to them, it is probably not worth getting into that debate!

The welcome and overdue resumption of Parliament next week will be another step-up in our Covid-19 response. The days of virtual one-party government we have endured in recent weeks will be at an end, and Ministers (even the long absent Minister of Health) will have to front up and be accountable to the House on a daily basis, required to give answers to the difficult questions the lockdown has so far enabled them to avoid. Also, the government will be able to progress some of its other legislative initiatives that have been languishing because they are not Covid-19 related, and the Minister of Finance will be able to deliver the 2020 Budget on May 14. Altogether, this more democratic process will mean the dynamic under which the government has been operating since the imposition of the lockdown will have to change.

Since the middle of March, the government has been following pretty much the usual political norms for dealing with a major crisis, albeit with the few inevitable slip-ups along the way.

First, was the identification of the crisis. From the time Covid-19 burst on the scene and the seriousness of the threat it posed to the whole world started to become obvious, the government began, slowly at first, but then steadily thereafter, framing its narrative in terms of the threat the virus and its rapid escalation posed to New Zealand. By early March it was moving to the types of solution New Zealand might have to look to imposing, if the virus continued its rampage. Soon thereafter, the Alert Level system was mooted, and the possibility of closing borders raised, although the tardiness with which the latter was implemented is still hard to understand.

By the time the move to Alert Level 3 followed by the almost overnight transition to Alert Level 4 occurred, the seeds that the country was facing a major, hitherto not experienced crisis had been well and truly sown in the public mind. That made the next stage of the suspension of Parliamentary government and its replacement by government through emergency regulations easier to bring about. At the same time, this was cleverly covered by the resort to inclusive language – like “we are all in this together” – both emphasising the extreme nature of the crisis the country was facing, and making compliance with the impositions on freedom about to be made that much easier. It also made it that much harder to be critical of what was happening, and it was no coincidence that public tolerance for dissident views or awkward questions fell sharply.

All this was reinforced by the daily press conferences with the Prime Minister, the Director General of Health, and initially the Commissioner of Police, to make clear in the early stages where the true authority lay, and to become the sole and dominant means by which official information was conveyed. We were even told not to believe things that had not been stated at the press conference. As time has gone on, and the numbers of new cases have dwindled, so too has the relevance of this daily event, which should disappear altogether once Parliament resumes.

Far preferable and more accountable that the Prime Minister make her regular announcements to the House where she can be questioned with more precision than at a press conference, where she controls who asks the questions and any follow-up. That change alone will start the process of winding back the highly centralised and controlled nature of our Covid-19 response.

Of course, critical to this whole process of crisis management is there being an actual crisis to manage. That has been clearly the case in places like the United States, Britain, Italy and Spain, for example, as the numbers of cases and deaths have been spiralling out of control and the public reaction has been one of desperate panic. While the potential impact for New Zealand was just as serious, the perverse consequence of acting early to avert the extent of the crisis has been that the extremes seen overseas have been averted. But an inevitable consequence is that some now question whether there was ever a crisis here in the first place.

Yet it is a more than reasonable conclusion that without the actions taken, the number of cases here could have been at least ten times higher than they are. On relative population terms that would have been about on a par with the United States and Britain. Which is why in its public presentations the government has been treading a fine line between too much celebration of our unexpectedly low numbers and continued warnings of the need for ongoing vigilance. It will need to maintain that balance for some time to come.

Nowhere will the line be more tested than in the process of withdrawing from the various Alert Levels. In many senses, that will be the hardest part of all. Winding back the emergency regulations and structures will not occur overnight. That is why the exit process will be gradual, no matter the decline or even ultimate absence of cases. The government will be reluctant to relax too much of the control structure built up in recent months but will have to adapt to doing so. It will also have to be seen to be looking beyond the Covid-19 outbreak and shifting its future focus to the enormous economic and social restructuring that now lies ahead. So, it will have to reshape its narrative in the same clear way it did at the outset to meet the new situation.

In short, next week’s events will set off a further process of major adjustment for the government, just as it will for every other New Zealander, so pervasive has been the impact of Covid-19 to date.

A leading pollster suggested earlier this week that the National Party may be best placed to win this year's election if it just stays quiet and lets the government wear all the criticism for the inevitable rising unemployment, business failures and massive personal dislocation brought on by the Covid-19 outbreak and its aftermath. Whether that musing is any way true or even likely of course remains to be seen. But in the meantime, the National Party seems to have taken the advice to heart and gone to sleep early, just in case.

In part, this is because the government’s initial way of responding to the Covid-19 outbreak was to effectively shut the National Party out of any role whatsoever. When the Leader of the Opposition reacted to this in Parliament – in the days when we still had a functioning Parliament – his response was widely criticised as churlish and striking completely the wrong tone. He clearly took the criticisms to heart, quickly ordering his MPs and candidates to suspend all overt political activity for the duration of the crisis. At the same time, he accepted a government offer to chair a special select committee reviewing the Covid-19 response. He has done so extremely well and showed cross-party co-operation in a time of national need at its best.

But, arguably, he has been too successful, seeming at times to be a stauncher defender of the government’s approach than the government itself. Witness the way he led the government to a stronger line on imposing border controls, for example. However, the weekly committee meetings, asking questions to which there are seldom crisp and clear answers, and never any decisions made, are beginning to look just a little too cosy. It all begins to beg the question of whether he has been politically snookered by the government – cleverly backed into a corner of support from which he cannot readily escape, while allowing it to get on with its job, without too much critical scrutiny.

With Parliament in indefinite abeyance there is little scope for it to currently be any other way. Parliament is the Opposition’s primary forum for holding the government to account and making its alternative case to the public. Given both the current situation, and the massive challenges that lie ahead as we move out of Alert Level 4 and beyond, let alone the huge period of economic and social reconstruction ahead of us, the early resumption of Parliament is hardly in the government’s interests. Even though there are many questions to be answered and numerous uncertainties to be understood, then resolved, the early return of parliament does not even appear to be on the government’s horizon at all. After all, why give the Opposition an open forum for criticism when the country faces such dire times?

Previously, whenever there has been a national crisis – invariably of a much lesser significance and threat than the Covid-19 crisis – the Opposition of the day, National or Labour, has always been quick to call for the immediate recall of Parliament to discuss the situation and, if need be, the official actions being taken in response. There have also been times when the government of the day has felt it necessary to have Parliament endorse its response to adverse circumstances that have arisen. For example, Parliament was recalled specifically to debate New Zealand’s response to the outbreak of the Gulf War in 1991, and has previously set aside time to debate what needed to be done in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Christchurch and Kaikoura earthquakes, and last year’s Christchurch mosque killings. There has always been the view that Parliament as the House of Representatives needs to be brought into the response to such issues.

Covid-19 is by and far away the biggest of all these crises. It is therefore puzzling, disturbing, and plain out of step with our long tradition, that apart from the initial debate in early February when the breadth of what was happening was not then fully appreciated here or around the world, the government has not seen fit to recall Parliament – albeit by videoconference – both to formally update it on its response, and seek its support for the steps being taken. Even more surprising and certainly more disturbing has been that the Opposition does not seem to have considered this a priority either. Yet the day to day lives of New Zealanders, in their homes, neighbourhoods, workplaces and schools are being impacted upon to a greater extent than even in wartime, when Parliament was in frequent session.

However, the crossroads are looming for the National Party. Assuming the election proceeds on 19 September, as seems reasonable given the Prime Minister’s recent assurances, National’s continuing to play the loyal back-up to the government will hand the coalition a huge advantage. Where is the case for change, if both sides of politics seem to agree on the current direction being taken?

Yet by September, life will not have returned to normal, however that is to be defined from now on. Indeed, it will be anything but. Thousands of businesses will have closed; tens of thousands of jobs will have been lost or put on the shelf; household debt will have soared. While New Zealanders’ resilience will be enabling them to get by, long term confidence in theirs and their children’s futures will have taken a severe hammering, and many future dreams and aspirations will have been permanently shattered. People may well be looking for a viable alternative to support, to restore hope. For that reason alone, if not the grander one of upholding democratic principles, National needs to be starting to distance itself, slowly but surely, from the government and its response. It needs to be showing itself as the party of the future, leaving Labour as the party of the crisis. But it needs the forum of Parliament to be seen to be doing that, which is why the government will not acquiesce.

The call to move out of Alert Level 4 next week is perhaps a start, but without Parliament sitting the country is being kept in the dark about what that means. Presumably National has clear intentions about how the threads of normal life should be picked up once again. The country needs to be hearing these alongside the government’s plans, so that it can assess the relative merits of both. For its part, the direction being proposed by National should appear positive, consistent, and clear. In that regard, making the case for the early resumption of a working Parliament to hold the government to proper account once more should be a no-brainer card for National to play well before the scheduled election

However, could it be that National was undoubtedly so badly scarred by the adverse public reaction to its leader’s early February comments that is has been spooked into a mode of quiescent support ever since, trying desperately to appear constructive while not rocking the boat too much. If so, medium term, this is not likely to be a winning strategy – unless, of course, National, ever mindful of being careful about what it wishes for, has concluded that in its own long term interests, the next election is now one it should not be trying too hard to win.

   

As the government starts to work on how it can move the country on at some point from its current Alert Level-4 status, the other political parties will be starting to think about how they can re-enter the fray and normal political debate can resume. After all, and not surprisingly, the focus of recent weeks has been almost exclusively on the Prime Minister and the senior team around her, with other political parties, with the occasional exception of the National Party, getting barely a look-in. Yet an election – still scheduled for September – is looming, so all of them will be trying to work out the best time to resume the usual political contest.

An inevitable consequence of the lockdown has been that almost every politician outside the top circle has been rendered largely irrelevant for the time being. National has been able to reclaim some relevance through its Leader’s positive chairing of the Epidemic Response Select Committee, but it is still very much on the government’s terms. He has properly judged that this is not yet the time for a resumption of full-on political engagement, so has focused instead on areas where the government’s lockdown approach looks particularly vulnerable – like for instance the apparently slack approach to protecting the border. At some point, though, he is going to have to the make the call to go further and resume the normal Opposition function if his party is going to appear as anything more than a pale imitation of the government at election time, whenever that might be.

But National’s challenges here are small compared to those facing the other parties – New Zealand First and the Greens in particular. The way the government has approached the pandemic crisis has effectively side-lined them and left them largely irrelevant. Not only have their particular issues been pushed off the agenda, but also, and more importantly, the government has so far demonstrated, albeit perhaps inadvertently, that it does not need their inputs to manage effectively. This was painfully and absurdly demonstrated by the New Zealand First Minister of Defence’s revelation that he has set up a virtual command post at his home, that no-one seems either to have noticed or taken any account of, leaving him to sit in splendid isolation. The Greens just seem to have disappeared altogether.

Before the Covid-19 crisis emerged both these parties were beginning to define themselves more separately from the Labour-led government they are part of to sharpen their brand definition and secure the support of their particular niches in the lead-up to the election. According to the last polls before the lockdown, neither could have been absolutely confident of their current electoral prospects. New Zealand First was consistently polling below the threshold for re-election and the Greens were hovering at or just above the threshold.

Historically, New Zealand First has always done better at election time than preceding polls suggest, although until now always from the position of being outside the government at election time, and the Greens, also from outside government, a little worse. For both, therefore, the election lead-up has normally been critical to their eventual prospects, especially both will have suffered some of the inevitable taint of having been part of the government since 2017. Yet this year circumstances seem likely to deprive them of their usual election year opportunity. But there is nothing they can do or could have done to prevent that, nor would the public have appreciated any overt politicking at this time by either of them to try to re-establish their position.

To make matters worse for both, there is the potential that the Labour Party, through its handling to date of the crisis could be a major beneficiary in terms of public support. While there are still many hurdles for it to cross and much opportunity for missteps that could cost public support, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that if New Zealand by election time is looking to have come through Covid-19 reasonably well, Labour could reap a significant electoral dividend. However, that would most likely come from currently soft New Zealand First and Green support. Every poll since the last election has shown National’s support to have remained pretty solid, so the likelihood of a significant crossover vote to Labour even in these circumstances is small.

But here is the problem. Current electoral mathematics mean that the Labour Party needs to have both New Zealand First and the Greens pass the 5% threshold to be confident of remaining in government after the election. Failure of one or both of these parties to cross that threshold will greatly increase the prospects of a National-led government emerging. Polls since the end of last year had already been showing National ahead, and able to form a government with the support of ACT, putting more pressure on New Zealand First and the Greens. A surge in Labour support now at the expense of New Zealand First and the Greens could have the unwelcome effect of seeing both of them out of Parliament altogether and Labour paradoxically out of office.

Before the Covid-19 outbreak Labour was showing small signs of understanding the need to give both New Zealand First and the Greens the space and freedom to differentiate on key policy areas to secure their electoral brands. Hence the Prime Minister’s remarkable tolerance of Shane Jones’ persistent and wilful breaches of the Cabinet Manual’s provisions on Ministerial conduct, and the various concessions to the Greens. However, once Covid-19 burst upon us, the government’s response quickly reverted to the old two-party approach. There was a belated, grudging acceptance of the role of the Opposition in a Parliamentary democracy (albeit one on hold for the duration) through the establishment of the Epidemic Response Select Committee chaired by the Leader of the Opposition, but there has been no obvious attempt to involve the government’s support partners in the process. They, along with many Ministers and all of the government’s backbench MPs, as well as most of the Opposition, have been left to twiddle their thumbs, irrelevant on the side-lines.

The perverse upshot may be that while the Prime Minister and her Labour colleagues win the battle against Covid-19 they could end up losing the war to secure a second term in office.  

A recurring theme in contemporary literature is of the plague that appears suddenly from nowhere and takes hold of the world, destroying or severely damaging life in the process. In 2003 acclaimed author Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake was premised on a super-pharmaceutical cutting loose and causing a global pandemic. The 2011 movie Contagion focused on a global pandemic that jumped from animals to humans and spread around the world. Perhaps most eerily of all though the American science fiction writer Dean Koontz predicted in a 1981 novel the emergence in 2020 of a man-made virus called Wuhan-400 with a 100% kill rate, which had been developed in Wuhan as a biological weapon but got out of control.

Although all these accounts are fictional, and while the tolerance for conspiracy theories should be limited even at the best of times, they do draw attention to situations that could become reality at some point. Yet, despite various occasional national and international warnings from researchers and clinicians, the Covid-19 outbreak has shown overall that the world was in a relatively poor state of preparation for such an occurrence.

This was notwithstanding the fact that in the last decade alone a number of global disease threats had appeared – Ebola, Zika and coronaviral diseases like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, known more commonly as SARS-Cov-1, to name just a few. Add to that, the constant threat of influenza related epidemics, and bioweapons, and the world should have well and truly been prepared for an event like Covid-19.

The New Zealand Influenza Pandemic Plan was published by the Ministry of Health in August 2017. It is a thorough and comprehensive document, but it does not appear that all that much has been happening since then to implement it. As early as late 2017, in the wake of the Ebola crisis health professionals were warning that New Zealand’s preparations for dealing with global disease outbreaks needed to be stepped up, both in terms of clinical and research capacity, and wider community response strategies.

The Pandemic Plan calls for “a nationally consistent monitoring and surveillance system during the period between pandemics” as an “essential component of preparedness.” It urges that “overseas trends must be monitored and analysed and surveillance systems in New Zealand maintained to enable the early detection of a novel influenza virus following announcements by WHO, and these systems must be capable of tracking the progress of a pandemic in New Zealand.”

But it is not clear what notice the government has taken of all the warnings. The difficulties we now hear reported almost daily of tracking Covid-19’s spread around New Zealand, and the initially slow and chaotic response, the shortage of essential items like ventilators, masks and gowns, not to mention the confusion over community testing, all confirm that the Plan has not been given the priority it deserved.

While not much can be done about that now, there are lessons for the future about the need to ensure that neglect never happens again, and that we are better prepared for the next global pandemic, whenever and in what form it may occur.

Because, as we have seen, the response to a major pandemic is a whole of government and not just a Ministry of Health issue, the way we deal with it needs to be similarly broad-based. Although the Plan acknowledges that, the response it suggests is a little narrow. It suggests the Ministry of Health should be the lead agency, but these issues are simply too big to leave to any one agency as the lead as is the case now. There needs to a single standing all of government agency, reporting directly to the Prime Minister on a quarterly basis.

That agency needs to have the capacity to review from time to time the overall state of future preparedness, and to be able recommend changes as necessary. It needs to be able to suggest to universities, research institutes and Ministers areas for future desirable research and to recommend appropriate levels of investment to ensure they occur. Also, it needs to be empowered to challenge the operational autonomy of District Health Boards to ensure a consistent range of clinical response is available across the country in such situations. PHARMAC needs to be in this loop as well to ensure funding is available to keep up the appropriate level of medicines and medical devices.

At the civil level, the pandemic co-ordination agency should set the parameters of any Police operations, both at the national and individual levels. For example, it is neither good enough nor acceptable for the Commissioner of Police to be able to say as he did this week, that while detailed operational instructions have been issued to individual Police officers during the current emergency he is not prepared to make those public. The Covid-19 response is not just another (albeit bigger than normal) Police operation so cannot be conducted that way. It involves many more public organisations than just the Police, so in these instances it needs to be clear that its traditional “constabulary independence” from the government has to become both subservient and accountable to the whole of government process.

While the immediate focus is on getting rid of Covid-19 in New Zealand, it would be foolhardy in the extreme to treat this as a once in a lifetime situation.  Rather than filing plans like the New Zealand Influenza Pandemic Plan on a shelf, we need to be ensuring they are constantly updated and kept in a state of readiness so that when next required they can be given effect to at a moment’s notice.